Youtube doesn’t count views as complete visualizations

Uh oh! It seems the views counter on Youtube isn’t as real as we could think it was! (well ok we didn’t). With the new 10 hours limit for videos that Youtube has set we can now enjoy the 10 hours Nyan Cat. Yes, wonderful, I know.

But if you have a look at the views counter you’ll see more than 875.000 views (at the moment I’m writing this entry). So the question is… have 876.000 people really spent 10 hours viewing that video?

So it looks like a Youtube visualization is not a visualization of the full video, neither half or a quarter or only its 10%… as it’s hard to believe that nearly 900.000 people have watched even a 10% (1 hour) of that video.

So it seems that Youtube counts as a visualization the simple action of pressing Play, independently of if you finally watched the video or not. Count now all those blogs or websites that show a video on autoplay config and you can understand better why some videos get milions and milions of views in such a short time.

Seen at Microsiervos, a spanish website.